Twilight at the Well of Souls

“No matter what you once might have been, you are a Dillian now. If you die on this world, you die a Dillian. If you live on this world, you live as a Dillian. You can not alter that. Even if you were to undergo the Well of Souls in the recreation, you would still be what you are now. You are this, now and forever.” He reached out the padlike hands, took her head in them, and held it, gently, for a moment.

“Ah,” he said. “Apprehension. Insecurity. Again you are wrong. If you should die tomorrow, there is still today. If you or he should die at any time, that would not negate the time you spend together. You still mourn your husband’s death, he a thousand years dead. Why?”

She felt held, compelled to look at the Gedemondan’s eyes, compelled to answer. “I loved him very much.”

He nodded. “And did you love him because he died?”

“Of course not!” She wished all this was over.

“You see. You mourned him because of the good life you had together. It is only life that has meaning, not death, O foolish child. Here, I will render what aid I can.”

There was a sudden cloud over her mind. She felt something, some energy, something alien, yet warm, kind, not at all threatening there. It was no hypnosis or mind control, merely some sort of reinforcement of what the Gedemondan was saying.

The huge white creature went over to a wall near the gate itself and rubbed off a lot of dust, so much that his arm started turning gray. To her surprise, it was a polished surface, glasslike yet seemingly natural.

“It is solid obsidian,” he told her. “Smoothed and finely polished in the earliest days of this hex. There, now, look into it and tell me what you see.”

Curious, and slightly amused by what seemed like dime-store psychiatry, she walked to it and looked. She saw herself, perfectly reflected in the mirrorlike surface.

“I am suppressing certain neural circuits in your brain,” he told her. “Nothing to do with thought or judgment, but sedating, shall we say, those extraneous matters that always color our thinking. It’s a simple thing, but useful. I doubt if we here could get along without the ability to do it to ourselves when need be. We can teach it to you easily, as it is simply conscious control of something the mind does anyway, but with less success in many cases.”

There were no more nightmares, no more lurking monsters in the shadows of her mind. For some reason she felt freer, clearer-headed than she could ever remember before. It seemed odd that suppressing something in the mind could make it crisper, somehow cleaner.

She looked again at her reflection and thought, almost curiously, That’s me. Face, breast, long, flowing blond hair, down to the golden-haired equine body that seemed perfectly shaped, perfectly suited to the rest, matched, a part of the whole. She had always, somehow, thought of centaurs, Rhone or Dillian, as simply humans with a horse stuck on the back. Now she saw that wasn’t true at all; she was a distinct, logical creature now, one which, in many ways, was far superior to the form in which she had been born. And, she realized, the Gedemondan had been right. The person she remembered wasn’t really her, not any more. It had never really been her. Its physical shape and form, so deliberately assembled so long ago, had been no more authentic than this form she now wore.

And what was form, anyway? Just something that made things harder or easier, depending on how you looked. Inside, where it counted, behind the eyes of those she had felt strongly about, that was truth. All her life, she realized, still looking at the sleek form reflected in the obsidian, she’d been living for the future or mourning the past. Seven years, seven short years so long ago were the only bright, shining jewel. Not because of her accomplishments—she had had them aplenty, and she was proud of them—but because of living, real joy of living.

She turned to the Gedemondan. “Yes, I would like to learn that someday. I think you have a lot to teach the rest of us. Maybe that would be your perfect role.” He nodded. “It will be considered.” She paused a moment more. “I think we’re ready to go now,” she told him at last. She went up to him and hugged him, and if he could have smiled, he certainly would have. Finally she said, “Your people seem so much wiser, so much more advanced than any I have known. I wish more could learn what you know.”

The Gedemondan shrugged. “Perhaps. But, remember, Gedemondans and Dillians both went out into the universe at the same time. Your race survived, grew, built, and expanded. Ours died out.” He gestured at Asam, who walked to and through the blackness of the Zone Gate. She turned and followed him.

The Gedemondan stood there a moment, then walked over and studied his own figure in the clear obsidian. It was a perfect surface and an exact reflection, and it worried him a great deal that there seemed to be an indefinable flaw in it.

The Gedemondan Embassy, Zone

They walked down the corridor, fighting mobs of people, trying to find the correct spot. The masses of humanity were unbelievable, not just to Asam, who hadn’t really visualized what was going on, but also to Mavra. Reality had the abstract beat all to hell.

Much larger than the humans making their way along the corridor, they pretty much had to push their way past. She looked at them as if they were an unknown species. How small and puny and weak they look, she thought.

For their part, the Entries, not yet processed through the Well, stared in mixed wonder and apprehension at the huge centaurs, which were at one and the same time familiar, from their experience with the Rhone, and yet alien as well.

At a particularly tight squeeze Mavra stopped suddenly. Asam looked at her and shouted over the din, “What’s the matter?”

“Just thought I might be missing a bet,” she yelled back. She concentrated hard, trying to get the simple thought into a form this mob could understand. Oddly, she still thought in Com speech; but now what she thought went through some sort of filter in her brain and came out in Dillian. The reverse was true when she heard Dillian spoken, although, as the Gedemondan had shown, she could understand Com speech as well. Thus she could make out the words of this babble but had to concentrate hard to get over the automatic translation. Still, the effect was that she finally started thinking in the native language and she tried to force her mouth to say the Com, rather than Dillian, words.

“I am Mavra Chang!” she shouted. “Remember me?”

Some of the women nearest her heard it, and started repeating the name, which caught on down the line. She started to push on through, every once in a while shouting “Mavra Chang,” the same in both languages. Although her pronounciation was heavily accented, and slightly garbled, they seemed to be getting the message.

It might have been a mistake, and in a lot of cases made it harder to move, for the humans, hearing the name, shouted questions or simply wanted to touch her, confirm her reality. Still, they reached their destination and the hex-shaped door opened to admit them, then closed behind, completely shutting out the din. The sudden silence was almost deafening.

Asam breathed a sigh of relief. “Umph! Gonna be hell gettin’ in and outta here, you know. You sure you did the right thing back there?”

“I wish I could do it for all of them,” she responded without hesitation. “It would make things easier if everybody knew I was a Dillian, knew where to look for me. Still, that little bit will travel up and down the mob and maybe some word will get around.”

“Maybe,” he said dubiously. “And it can’t do a lot of harm, I suppose. After all, we know the enemy knows where to look.”

They looked around the area, which was totally barren, just smooth walls with rounded corners, a smooth floor and nothing else whatsoever.

Asam looked back at the door. “I thought that only opened when willed by a member of the race the embassy was for,” he noted. “That’s how ours works.”

“I think we’re expected,” she told him. “The Gedemondans?” He looked at her accusingly. “Damn it, I still